Rite Aid 'restructured' once, kept the stores, and was liquidated eight months later

On 15 October 2023 Rite Aid filed for Chapter 11 in New Jersey, facing roughly $4 billion of debt and more than a thousand opioid-related lawsuits. The board replaced CEO Heyward Donigan with Jeffrey Stein, who was also named chief restructuring officer, and lenders put up $3.45 billion in new funding. The plan: close 'underperforming locations' and shed enough of the balance sheet to keep the rest of the chain alive.

It was a half-measure. Rite Aid trimmed its store base rather than confronting it, emerging on 3 September 2024 as a private company with Matt Schroeder elevated from CFO to CEO, still running well over a thousand outlets. The opioid settlements, the debt and the store-by-store unprofitability had not gone away; the restructuring had only postponed the reckoning with them.

On 5 May 2025 — eight months after exit — Rite Aid filed for Chapter 11 a second time. It still had 1,277 stores across fifteen states and about 24,500 employees, and the court filings said plainly that it would liquidate every location unless a buyer appeared. None did at scale. The pharmacy assets were sold off in a court-approved fire sale, and the last 89 stores closed by October 2025, ending a 63-year-old chain.

The human cost fell where the spreadsheet never reached. Two restructurings inside two years meant two rounds of WARN notices, two waves of shuttered pharmacies, and staff rehired and re-cut in the interval. A workforce of tens of thousands was whipsawed by a plan that treated the store count as fixable in instalments when the underlying business — over-extended since the 2007 Brooks and Eckerd acquisitions and unable to match CVS or Walgreens — could not support any of it.